24. “Because You Loved Me” #2
“He came from a broken home,” she said fast. “His folks…” She shook her head.
“It was bad. He didn’t want his children to grow up shuffled from one bitter parent to the other.
After he did, erm…what he did, he tried with her.
Mom, I mean. She put him through the wringer.
She never let him forget it, she never forgave him for it, and she never stopped punishing him for it.
But he stuck it out until we were all through college and starting our own lives because he didn’t want us to live in a broken home. ”
“Let me guess, you aren’t close to your mom,” Shanti drawled.
Julia glanced at her but didn’t answer her question.
She said, “He messed up, he really did. I’m not going to defend him for cheating or any of what came after.” Her attention returned to me. “But the punishment, in her case, did not fit the crime. Like, on a day-to-day basis, she made him choose. Ximena’s son, or her children.”
Whoa.
She knew Javi’s mom’s name?
And whoa again.
Austin’s ex seemed like a total bee-yotch.
“Sometimes, I think, and I really wish I didn’t, but I do, she had me and Cath just to have more to hold over him,” Julia admitted in a small voice.
Oof .
Total bee-yotch.
“It tore him up,” Julia continued. “It got to the point we knew if Dad lost track of where Javier was because he was…you know.”
Oh, we knew.
Javi was living on the streets and doing that didn’t come with a forwarding address.
Julia kept going, “We knew because Dad would be…he’d be really upset.” You could tell that was a vast understatement. “And then Mom would turn the thumbscrews.”
Mm-hmm.
She wasn’t close to her mom.
And Tiffany Atherton was a complete and total bee-yotch.
“Then he should have grown a pair and saved his three kids from living with that, and his other kid from living his own hell,” Luna stated the straight-up truth.
“That’s easy for you or even me to say,” Julia replied.
“When we’re not living it. When we don’t have his history.
When we weren’t the ones who messed things up in the first place by stepping out on our spouse.
When we didn’t vow to ourselves that we’d give better to our kids than we had growing up and we screwed that up from the jump. ”
Again, she turned to me.
“He didn’t make the right decisions, but at the time, he thought he was doing the best he could. Then Patrick went off the rails. Cath doesn’t speak to Mom. I do my best to avoid her. And Javier…”
She let that trail, but we all knew what happened to Javi.
Another thing I did not want that I had to pocket for now (or forever) until Javi needed it?
It was clear Julia and Cath were dedicated to their dad.
He was the one who created this situation, and they were female, but they were still devoted to him. At the expense of their mother, who, in the beginning, was the wronged partner.
So, first, what Tiffany put them through must have been super bad.
And second, evidence was suggesting Austin was a really loving dad who’d earned that devotion.
I tucked that away and got into something else.
“You know Ximena’s name?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Dad talks about her. He says she was really beautiful. He wonders, if he could have intervened, if she’d have gotten as bad as she did.
” Her expression changed to earnest as she went on, “I’m honestly not saying this to bullshit you.
But truly, I think, the way he talks about her, he loved her.
Or at least he cared about her a lot. What I do know is, it wasn’t a one-night stand at all. ”
Dang it!
This I really didn’t need.
“He just couldn’t…” she continued, “with Mom…Patrick on the way…things just got really complicated.”
“You can say that again,” Luna spat.
Julia ignored Luna and picked up her earlier trail.
“Even though Mom and Dad split a while ago, it took him forever to get up the courage to approach Javier. He knew this would happen. He just…he just…”—her shoulders slumped—“wanted to keep at him so Javier would know he wasn’t going to give up.
That he cared. That this wasn’t a lark or something. That he was going to put the work in.”
“And this matters now, how?” Jessie demanded. “Javi’s made his decision and anything else from your dad is only adding insult to injury.”
“He knows that now, I guess,” Julia mumbled.
“So you think Harlow should share this tale of woe with Javi?” Raye asked.
And, man , the girls were giving no quarter. They totally had Javi’s back.
Gah!
I loved them so much !
“I just…I just…” Julia drew in a breath and released it. “I guess I just wanted someone to know.”
“Now she knows,” Ally stated. “Are you done?”
Julia nodded.
“Let’s roll,” Stella said.
“Wait, are you…? Holy cow. You’re Stella Gunn,” Julia breathed, staring wide-eyed at Stella.
And there it was. Such was the darkness of the vibe, it took that long for her to notice she was keeping company with Rock ’n’ Roll Royalty.
“In the flesh,” Stella replied, and then she jerked her head at the Angels and the Rock Chicks.
We moved to our cars.
And we rolled.
* * *
“I’m getting your concern with the pink nutribullet. All this pink I’m sure is making my dick shrink.”
Late that night, lying crashed out, naked, post sex, on Javi’s big, strong body on my bed at the Oasis, I lifted up only enough to smack his pectoral.
“It is not. Trust me, I’d notice,” I replied.
He grinned roguishly.
I rolled my eyes.
His grin died and he threaded his fingers into the side of my hair.
“You good?”
I smiled brightly at him. “Did you not hear me mention your boy parts are healthy and functioning, something I very recently tested out?”
His lips twitched but his voice lowered. “They’re celebrating your brother’s birthday right now.”
Ugh.
I did a face plant in his chest.
As I did, he allowed his fingers to sift through my hair to cup the back of my head.
“You’re not good,” he muttered.
I turned so my cheek was to his chest and said, “I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t been thinking about it all evening.
” I switched positions again to rest my chin on the back of my stacked hands so I could catch his eyes.
“But I made my decision. If cutting the toxicity out of your life was easy, people would do it without thinking about it. The thing is, it’s not. You just have to stay the course.”
“Yeah, you do,” he said softly, then he did fabulous things to my girl parts (and my heart) when his deep voice veritably crooned, “My good girl with a spine of steel, staying the course.”
“Stop making me want to cry,” I demanded. Or orgasm , I did not say.
“Okay, then, how’d it go when you, your girls and my boys went to confront my father?”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from going really, really big.
But of course, he’d figure it out.
I was in the midst of trying to decide if I should lie to him (for now) or come clean (I had to schedule my How to Deal with an Alpha classes, tout de suite ), when he wrapped his arms around me and rolled us so I was on my back and he was mostly on me, just down my side.
“I knew it was going to happen the minute I lost it after I shut the door on them this morning,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I know I promised not to do it, but I just…you were just…”
“Babe, I had a word with your dad yesterday. I get what you were just.”
So, he did do it.
Yikes.
And.
Yay!
He was so totally falling for me too!
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“You first,” he countered.
Ugh again.
“Julia was there,” I started.
I said no more.
Javi stared at me.
Gosh, he was so incredibly gorgeous.
I mean, really, my big, muscular, handsome, very manly man in my pink and green and velvet bedroom?
Seriously a turn on.
“Harlow,” he growled.
Ugh!
With no choice, I ran it down for him.
The worst part about doing that?
Javi listened with such intensity, it was like my words were feeding him. Like his dad and sister wanting him in their life was nourishment to him.
I skipped the part about how Austin looked at his daughter and how determined he was for his son to have a relationship with his girls. I also skipped a lot of what Julia said about Austin’s growing-up years, though I did tell him Tiffany gave Austin an unthinkable ultimatum, and I left it at that.
When I finished talking, Javi didn’t start.
So I smoothed my hand over his hair, ending it at his neck so I could stroke his jaw with my thumb.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I never knew.”
“Never knew what?”
“When she’d talk about him. Ma. Sometimes, she’d say he was the love of her life.
Sometimes she’d say he was an assclown. When I was a kid, I’d have trouble knowing if she was lucid or not.
So I never knew which way it really was.
And then the illness took her, she stopped talking about him and barely made sense at all. ”
“It can be both, you know,” I said carefully.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“I told Julia they had to wait for you to approach,” I said.
“Thanks, baby,” he whispered.
I caught him by the back of the neck to bring him closer before I shared, “So maybe there’s some evidence he’s a nice guy. Maybe he didn’t have any good choices and still made the wrong ones. You were not conflicted by how you felt about him before. This doesn’t have to change anything.”
“What if now, I don’t have any good choices and still make the wrong ones?”
Oh, my guy.
“Don’t let them get under your skin, sweetheart,” I advised. “You don’t have to look out for your mom anymore. You don’t have to look out for anyone, but yourself. Do what gives you peace of mind.”
“And you.”
“In this, I don’t factor. It’s all about you.”
“No, I mean, now I got you to look after.”
Oh boy.
As sweet as that was, I wasn’t sure about it.
I was a grown woman. I paid my bills. I could look after myself and had been doing so for some time.
“No, Lolita.” Javi yet again read my mind. “Like you had my back today. We look after each other.”
Oh.
Well, that I could do.
I smiled at him.
He shook his head even while dipping in to kiss me.
When he pulled away, he said, “Gotta admit, in the beginning, after meeting you, then losing Jamal and Joaquim, I kept clear because I was holding a lot of guilt and grief about how they went out, and I didn’t want to lay that on you.”
I went back to smoothing his thick, soft hair, but I used both hands this time. “I hope you’ve learned you can lay anything on me.”
“Yeah,” he said softly, and that might have been the prettiest syllable I’d ever heard uttered.
“And what happened to your soldiers isn’t your fault,” I stressed.
“I know that logically. But that isn’t always how your mind works.”
I got that, so I nodded.
“Your dad was an arrogant ass,” Javi announced.
I stared.
“He wasn’t a fan of his daughter’s boyfriend demanding to see him.”
Well, there was that.
Javi kept going.
“He was all about bluster, and that bluster hid his guilt. He knows his wife and son treat you like dirt. He just doesn’t have big enough balls to put a stop to it.”
I had suspected this for quite some time.
“If that’s true, it kinda makes it worse,” I said forlornly, because Javi saying what I suspected made it seem real. And the realness of it hurt. “It wasn’t, you know, just neglect. It was deliberate neglect.”
“Agreed,” Javi grunted.
“Is he gonna stay away?” I asked.
“Is he still calling?”
“I haven’t had a call in a while.” Definitely not yesterday or today.
“Then…maybe.”
Or, maybe not.
One thing I knew, if he did, I had Javi, I had my girls, I had the Hottie Squad, Tito and Tex.
I’d be okay.
“If he shows, and you need me, no matter what I’m doing, call me. I’ll find my way to you,” Javi declared.
I’ll find my way to you .
Should I tell him I was falling in love with him?
“Baby,” he whispered, his face the picture of warmth, his glamorous golden eyes soft and doting.
He read my mind again.
And I was right.
He was falling too.
“You’re the best boyfriend ever, Javier Montoya,” I stated.
He smiled and rolled us so I was on top again, then he sat up so I was straddling him.
“And you give as good as you get, Harlow O’Neill,” he replied.
I dazzled him with a smile.
And then Javi kissed me, and he dazzled me with something altogether different.